04-21-2014, 11:15 PM
quote:
Originally posted by David M
Human assisted grafting is simply genetic modification in a different, more acceptable, form.
No it's not. Grafting is merely a physical process that allows branches from one species to grow on the rootstock of another. There is no exchange of genetic material. In the back pages of Popular Mechanics magazine there used to be a plant nursery ad for a grafted tree that had five kinds of fruit on it to plant in your garden. But if you saved the seeds from the limes, for example, and planted them, they would come up exactly the same variety of limes. Ditto the lemons, etc. And I see you can buy multi-colored rose bushes, created the same way, by grafting. But any offspring will not have that quality, because there is no genetic modification whatsoever.
This method is used extensively in agriculture. Essentially all the French varietal wine grapes are grafted onto American rootstock, because our native varieties are resistant to the Phylloxera disease that nearly wiped out their vineyards many decades ago. Many kinds of sweet oranges are grafted onto sturdier bitter orange root stock without changing the resulting oranges in any way.